I went to the pharmacy the other day to pick up my meds, duh. I made the chitchat with the person at the counter, which, as we live in Minnesota, was about the weather. It’s a balmy 41 degrees, but it’s going to dramatically drop soon. There is a severe weather warning for sudden drop in temps and gusts of wind up to 40 mph. The teller was saying, “That’s what we get for living in Minnesota” while I sympathetically said it’s time to get the heater going. I know the right words to say in this situation!
Never mind that I love cold and that I am grumpy with 41 degrees. Never mind that we do, indeed, live in Minnesota, which is notorious for its cold. We are in the middle of a Wind Chill Advisory at the moment with warnings that it could get down to -35 windchill. That’s pretty cold, even for me.
Anyway! I have had a version of this ‘it’s so cold’ chat many times while paying for my groceries. There was a period in my life when I’d try to say that I liked cold or something to that effect because I wanted to put it out there that not everyone hated cold. I gave up on that rather quickly, however, because no one wanted to hear that. Also, the cashiers don’t need that in their life. They’re just making small talk, not trying to get to know me and my philosophies.
I don’t feel the need to make my uniqueness known to people I’m not going to interact with on a meaningful level. I have to admit that I was irked after getting out of the hospital because my mother would blurt out my life story to anyone who would listen. She would use it as a way to get what she wanted, which made me very uncomfortable. I was venting to my brother about it and he said, “Remember, no one will think of you at the end of the day.” Which, weirdly enough, comforted me. He was right. These people would go home at the end of the day and not even remember they met me. You are never as big in someone else’s mind as you are in your own.
I am a weirdo, I will cheerfully admit it. I revel in it and have no problem with people knowing it. I am known to be oppositional, but I come by it honestly. It started when I was a fat, gawky, Taiwanese American girl in a lily-white St. Paul suburb. I didn’t know anything about pop culture and I had no idea how to fake it. Seriously. We didn’t go to movies and the first pop song I ever heard was Electric Avenue by Eddy Grant in sixth grade. That’s probably an apocryphal story rather an actual memory, but it sums up my childhood experience rather neatly.